Radio Scope Woman's Hour: Sex on the CouchBBC Radio 4, Thursday, 10am A couple of decades before I became a counsellor, a friend of a friend began to attend a psychologist, an unusual enough thing to do at the time.
Things seemed to go well and after four or five months she announced that she was sleeping with her psychologist.
I was horrified but such is the callousness of youth that the thing that horrified me was the fact that her psychologist was over 50 years old. How could she possibly sleep with a man of such advanced years I wondered?
Today I would be horrified for a different reason: for a psychologist or a counsellor to sleep with a client involves a destructive and unforgivable breach of trust.
In the 1990s, research in the US and the UK suggested that up to 4 per cent of psychologists and counsellors have sex with their clients either while the therapy is still going on or after it is finished. And it's not all male therapists who do this - they include a substantial minority of women.
Woman's Hour last week addressed the issue, thanks to the work of a charity called Witness, which helps people abused by health professionals.
Witness says it has had 31 complaints in the past two years about counsellors crossing boundaries with their clients, mostly sexually.
The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) says it receives far fewer complaints than this and not usually to do with sexual behaviour.
Rather, they concern therapists who seek to develop friendships over and above their professional relationships with their clients. It suggests that many of the complaints received by Witness may relate to therapists who are not accredited.
Both Witness and the BACP are in favour of official regulation of counselling and psychotherapy. The British government has said the area will be subject to regulation by the Health Professions Council.
The man from the BACP pointed out, however, that this is not the end of the matter: doctors have been strictly regulated for many years yet some doctors engage in scandalous behaviour nevertheless.
In Ireland we have to assume that a small percentage of counsellors sexually misuse their clients or former clients.
The conversation which takes place in the counselling room is often more intimate than any conversation the client has with other people in his or her life. The same may very well be true of the counsellor.
Therefore, the potential for these conversations to tip over into something that breaches the boundaries of a professional relationship is very much present.
But it is the job of the counsellor to manage this situation. The counsellor who cannot manage the situation should not be in the business.
Witness has a website at www.popan.org.uk/ and you can hear the programme by locating Woman's Hour on the BBC website and navigating via the "listen again" button.